7 Ways Conservative Activists Are Harassed By The Left

The harassment that seems to follow people who get caught in the crosshairs of Speedway bomber Brett Kimberlin has started to put a spotlight on the staggering level of abuse that many activists, columnists, and bloggers on the Right have to endure just to exercise their First Amendment rights. If liberals had to deal with 1/10 of the same amount of harassment that conservatives do, it would be a front page story in every major paper in America and Barack Obama would be giving speeches about it. Unfortunately for those of us in the new media on the Right, we’re considered important enough on the Left to try to destroy us, but we’re not important enough to the Right to draw the funding we need to get appropriate legal protection, to properly investigate stories, and to insure that an independent blogosphere still exists five years from now (Sorry, pet peeve). Since many people are unaware of what goes on behind the scenes, it seems like a good time to catalogue just some of the tactics liberals are using to try to stifle free speech on the Right.

1) SWAT-ting: At least three conservatives, Patterico from Patterico’s Pontifications, Erick Erickson from Redstate, and Mike Stack from The Crying Wolfe have been SWAT-ted. That means someone called the police, claimed to be the person in question, and told them he had killed someone. The idea is to agitate the police and send them to the target’s house where they’ll hopefully kill the victim before they figure out what’s going on.

4) Hacking: Both Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney have had their emails hacked. Tabitha Hale had her email hacked as well. Mandy Nagy from Breitbart had her Twitter account hacked. I know of at least one other instance, which isn’t public, of a blogger having his email hacked.

John Hawkins: Speaking of vitriol and horror, Michelle and her family once had to actually move for safety reasons. Long story short, a group of misfits at UC Santa Cruz managed to run some military recruiters off campus and, because they weren’t very smart, they wrote a press release bragging about it, posted it on their website, and used their own home phone numbers as contact numbers. Michelle was one of the many people to link to the website and publish the press release and when, inevitably, these morons were deluged with abusive phone calls, they blamed Michelle for the whole thing and accused her of publishing their private home numbers, which, of course, they had posted on a press release.

In response to this, liberal bloggers and forums that were undoubtedly hoping to get Michelle and her family harassed and/or murdered, responded by posting her phone number and maps to her house online while maliciously and falsely accusing her of invading the privacy of the UC Santa Cruz students. After asking her about the experience, here’s what she told me,

Michelle Malkin: (We had) people posting photos of our past house…people urging their minions to come and stake out my house. ….I had tons of people email me and tell me they were going to come to my home. They posted my private phone number and I had dozens of people calling and leaving crude messages. …Yeah, it was one of those things where you think about your family, you think about your safety, and you do what you have to do. But, does it stop you? No.

7) Porno-izing Conservative Women: Amanda Carpenter had her face pasted onto 400 pages of pornography. Ann Coulter has had graphic pornographic sex stories written about her that were passed around on the left side of the blogosphere. Hustler put together multiple porno movies designed to mock Sarah Palin and they also photoshopped S.E. Cupp with a penis in her mouth. Additionally, Playboy did a ““hate f*ck” list that targeted women like Mary Katharine Ham, Laura Ingraham, and Michele Bachmann with comments like, “(On Mary Katharine Ham): You get this one pregnant, she stays pregnant. Karma’s a b*tch, isn’t it?”